For many, the election battle on healthcare is personal
Voters dealing with serious medical issues are galvanized by the Affordable Care Act.
A few short years ago, Kim Adams couldn’t have told you the name of her representative in Congress.
That changed last year, when Republican Rep. Mimi Walters voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act as Adams watched live on C-Span from her home in Tustin. News cameras showed a smiling Walters taking a celebratory selfie in the White House Rose Garden after the vote on the Obama-era healthcare law.
That, Adams said, made things personal. After she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999, Adams lost her small business as her health deteriorated and eventually could no longer afford her health insurance premiums. For three years, the single mother was uninsured and unable to get treated for her MS — until the Affordable Care Act kicked in. And her congresswoman had voted to take it away.
“I told people, she’s got a bull’s-eye on her back now from me,” Adams recalled.
In this midterm season with the control of the House and the fate of the Affordable Care Act at stake, Adams is telling her story to everyone who will listen. She’s told it in online videos, in a newspaper op-ed and in front of crowds. She spoke at
a healthcare roundtable in Florida and flew to Pennsylvania to work on a congressional campaign.
She’s one of the many people taking part in the changing conversation over the healthcare issue. As the Affordable Care Act’s provisions have become reality and the GOP repeal effort threatened to take insurance away from people benefiting from it, the law has gone from a political hot potato for Democrats to a Republican liability. Polls have shown voters nationwide care deeply about healthcare.
“The threat of this law being repealed crystallized in some people’s minds how valuable it really is,” said Gerald Kominski, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA.
Kominski, who worked on the rollout of the healthcare exchange in California, said that until last year’s GOP effort, “the debate and the discussion about repeal and replace was all kind of hypothetical. Now it’s become a real possibility that this law is going to be repealed.”
Democrats, targeting vulnerable Republican members of Congress, are making healthcare the centerpiece of their effort to take control of the House. Republicans in competitive races are no longer trumpeting their efforts to repeal Obamacare, even professing support for popular parts of the law they had demonized for years.
Many voters in hotly contested congressional districts in California say they know, or know of, someone who would be bankrupt, ill or dead were it not for the law. Those people are speaking up — at rallies, in campaign videos and to neighbors — in these battleground districts, putting a face to what was once an abstract, amorphous government bureaucracy with unknown consequences.
Brandon Zavala of Antelope Valley is one of those faces. He was 12 when his mother died of a heart condition he says routine tests could have caught. He says he didn’t connect the dots as a teenager but came to realize that if she had been able to afford insurance, she
could have lived far past the age of 37.
Now, 13 years later, Zavala is on doorsteps and phone lines, telling the story of how his parents decided to forgo their own health insurance to save money, while keeping their two sons’ coverage. About a year after she went without visits to the doctor, his mother collapsed in the family’s living room.
“I started realizing it wasn’t an accident, it wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t God calling her home,” he said. “No. We didn’t have health insurance and she couldn’t get the bloodwork she needed.”
This election cycle, Zavala has organized rallies, trained volunteers and launched canvasses to get Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale) booted out of office for his vote to repeal the healthcare law. Zavala supports Democrat Katie Hill, who has talked about the importance of affordable healthcare. Hill also has firsthand experience — her husband had a medical emergency while he was uninsured between
jobs and ended up $200,000 in debt.
“I will never forgive the Republican Party for creating an environment where more 12-year-olds have to bury their mother,” Zavala said.
Just before the 2010 midterm election, when the healthcare overhaul was a hot-button issue fueling the rise of the tea party, Obamacare was viewed unfavorably by slightly more Americans than those who approved, and a third of Republican ads mentioned healthcare. Now opinions have flipped and more than half of Democratic ads tout candidates’ positions on healthcare, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.
Republicans are scrambling to shore up their healthcare platforms by vowing to protect people with preexisting conditions, embracing a marquee protection of the health law they have been trying to get rid of for years.
In September, Knight sponsored a bill to maintain
protections for preexisting conditions, joined by a slew of vulnerable House Republicans including Walters and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (RCosta Mesa). The website GovTrack gives the bill a 4% chance of being enacted.
Shana Charles, an assistant professor of public health at Cal State Fullerton, said the shift in attitudes toward healthcare was most apparent in how Republicans are now echoing some selling points of the Affordable Care Act. Charles lives in Orange County’s 39th Congressional District, where Democrat Gil Cisneros is locked in a tight battle with Republican Young Kim for the job of her former boss, Rep. Ed Royce. Kim voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“Someone like Young Kim, when you listen to her campaign commercials, she sounds like someone who always loved the ACA,” Charles said. “That’s the language that they’ve moved to.”
Charles said that in the
early days of the healthcare law, the prevailing sentiment was one of fear and confusion, without a clear counter-narrative against Republican attacks. Now people are publicly calling attention to their personal healthcare stories, she said.
Leonard Musgrave, a 76year-old retired test engineer and full-time political junkie, might as well be saying “I told you so.”
The longtime registered Republican — the only Democrat he remembers voting for is John F. Kennedy — wrote a letter to the editor of the Orange County Register when the GOP repeal effort gathered steam: “Republicans are going to commit political suicide by trying to repeal and replace Obamacare.”
“They should just wait until it collapses on its own,” Musgrave, who lives in Orange, wrote in March 2017.
Musgrave, who spends his days listening to political talk radio as he does woodworking in his garage, said he’s sensed the change in
how people talk about the Affordable Care Act. “It’s probably got to the point where people are living with it and it’s maybe working out for them. I don’t hear a lot of people complaining about it,” he said.
That hasn’t changed his mind — he fears the healthcare law has made the national debt worse. As for which side has it figured out on what to do about healthcare, he has little confidence in the whole lot. “I don’t think either one of them know what to do to solve the problem,” he said. “It’s something they can talk about and throw around.”
Musgrave lives in California’s 45th District, a longtime Republican stronghold where Walters’ challenger, Katie Porter, is championing a government-funded universal healthcare system.
At a healthcare town hall in Irvine last month, Porter, a consumer protection attorney, said that when she worked in bankruptcy courtrooms in the early 2000s, she saw families whose lives had changed overnight after a health emergency.
“If you have unlimited money, you already have universal healthcare in this country,” she told the crowd of medical students and voters.
“Make no mistake — this election is about the future of our healthcare system.”
Adams sees it that way. The 56-year-old is healthier now but lives with reminders of the three years her disease went untreated — permanent nerve damage in her right eye, leg and foot. More devastating to her is the thought of what her daughter went through.
“I lost three years of being able to care for my daughter, worrying the whole time, living in constant panic,” she said. “I lost those years of my life.”
In December, she went to Washington to lobby Walters; she met with an aide instead and didn’t believe her message got through. Now she’s focused on talking to those with the power to vote Republicans out of office.
“The only thing I can do is tell my story,” she said.